NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTHitman: Absolution
The third game in our revised lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.
Based on our results I suspect Hitman is CPU limited beyond 85fps or so, which is depressing our results on these extremely powerful cards. Titan is by far the fastest of the single-GPU cards, but at 2560 it only beats the GTX 680 by 34%, and the 7970GE by 18%. If we jump up to 5760 we can see that Titan pulls ahead by more, now 48% and 33% respectively, and this is probably the most pure GPU result we’re going to get out of Hitman.
Note that the dual-GPU cards still do better than Titan here, but they are running right into the wall presented by the CPU bottleneck. Their 17% leads are nothing to scoff at, but it may not be all they’re capable of.
Meanwhile thanks to its built-in benchmark, Hitman is one of the most consistent games in our lineup, making it a good candidate for including the minimum framerate, which we have below.
The minimum framerates on Hitman show Titan in an even better light. Though it still loses to the dual-GPU configurations, it’s now 40% ahead of the GTX 680 and 25% ahead of the 7970GE respectively. And amusingly enough, at 2560 Titan is just fast enough to hit 60fps minimum.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
337 Comments
View All Comments
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
ROFL another amd fanboy having a blowout. Mommie will be down to the basement with the bar of soap, don't wet your pants.When amd dies your drivers will still suck, badly.
trajan2448 - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - link
Until you guys start showing latencies, these reviews based primarily on fps numbers don't tell the whole story. Titan is 4x faster than multi GPU solutions in real rendering.IUU - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
Just a thought: if they price titan say at 700 or 500 (that was the old price point for flagship cards), how on earth will they market game consoles, and the brave "new" world of the mobile "revolution"?Like it or not, high tech companies have found a convenient way to get away from the cutthroat competition of the pc-land(from there their hate and slogans like post-pc and the rest) and get a breath of fresh(money) air!
Whether this is also good for the consumer in the long run, remains to be seen, but the fact is, we will pay more to get less, unless something unexpected happens.
paul_59 - Saturday, June 15, 2013 - link
I would appreciate any intelligent opinions on the merits of buying a 690 card versus a Titan, considering they retail for the same pricebravegag - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - link
I have bought the EVGA nVidia GTX Titan, actually two of them instead of the Tesla K20 thanks to the benchmark results posted in this article. However, the performance results I got are nowhere close to the ones shown here. Running DGEMM from CUDA 5.5 and CUBLAS example matrixMulCUBLAS with my EVGA nVidia GTX Titan reaches no more than 220 GFlop/s which is nowhere close to 1 TFlop/s. My question is then, are the results presented here a total fake?I created the following project where some additional HPC benchmarks of the nVidia GTX Titan are included, the benchmark computing environment is also detailed there:
https://github.com/bravegag/eigen-magma-benchmark
bravegag - Wednesday, August 14, 2013 - link
have anyone tried replicating the benchmark results shown here? how did it go?Tunnah - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
It feels nVidia are just taking the pee out of us now. I was semi-miffed at the 970 controversy, I know for business reasons etc. it doesn't make sense to truly trounce the competition (and your own products) when you can instead hold something back and keep it tighter, and have something to release in case they surprise you.And I was semi-miffed when I heard it would be more like a 33% improvement over the current cream of the crop, instead of the closer to 50% increase the Titan was over the 680, because they have to worry about the 390x, and leave room for a Titan X White Y Grey SuperHappyTime version.
But to still charge $1000 even though they are keeping the DP performance low, this is just too far. The whole reasoning for the high price tag was you were getting a card that was not only a beast of a gaming card, but it would hold its own as a workstation card too, as long as you didn't need the full Quadro service. Now it is nothing more than a high end card, a halo product...that isn't actually that good!
When it comes down to it, you're paying 250% the cost for 33% more performance, and that is disgusting. Don't even bring RAM into it, it's not only super cheap and in no way a justification for the cost, but in fact is useless, because NO GAMER WILL EVER NEED THAT MUCH, IT WAS THE FLIM FLAMMING WORKSTATION CROWD WHO NEEDING THAT FLIM FLAMMING AMOUNT OF FLOOMING RAM YOU FLUPPERS!
This feels like a big juicy gob of spit in our faces. I know most people bought these purely for the gaming option and didn't use the DP capability, but that's not the point - it was WORTH the $999 price tag. This simply is not, not in the slightest. $650, $750 tops because it's the best, after all..but $999 ? Not in this lifetime.
I've not had an AMD card since way back in the days of ATi, I am well and truly part of the nVidia crowd, even when they had a better card I'd wait for the green team reply. But this is actually insulting to consumers.
I was never gonna buy one of these, I was waiting on the 980Ti for the 384bit bus and the bumps that come along with it...but now I'm not only hoping the 390x is better than people say because then nVidia will have to make it extra good..I'm hoping it's better than they say so I can actually buy it.
For shame nVidia, what you're doing with this card is unforgivable